The estate was eleven thousand dollars, a reverse-mortgaged house with no equity in it, a Timex, and a Rolex he bought in 1998 that turned out to be a very good fake.

He wore both of them on the night in the parking garage, one on each wrist, and I have never worked out why, and there is no one left to ask.

I paid for the funeral out of the trust account. It cost nine thousand two hundred dollars. I did the wire transfer myself on a Tuesday morning and sat there afterward with my hand still on the mouse for about a minute.

Three other things, and then I’m done.

Rosa. She will not take money from me. I offered twice and the second time she got properly angry, which I had never seen and do not intend to see again.

So I did the only thing she would accept, which is the thing I am actually good at. I pulled six years of her returns and found that in the panic of 2018 nobody had claimed the loss on the Athmar Park sale correctly, that she’d been paying estimated tax on an installment structure that no longer existed, and that two years of state credits had never been filed at all.